A review by emergencily
Witch Hat Atelier, Volume 1 by Kamome Shirahama

5.0

i'm super blown away by her linework, posing and panelling.  every few pages, i turn a new page and gasp out loud at how beautiful and creative she is with her panelling and composition. she casually drops insanely detailed and creative full page spread masterpieces every chapter.  i love the art nouveau influence in her work in this manga. she really has an intuition for panelling and for making full use of manga as a medium.

(this is a sadly low bar to clear in popular manga) but it really is refreshing and heartening to see a fairly popular manga purposefully and mindfully try to reckon with disability, queerness, sexual violence, poverty and inequity as part of its world and characters in a thoughtful way. i really appreciate her consideration of what living with a disability and what accommodations for disability would look like in a magical fantasy setting without just using hand-wavey cure-all magic erasure, as is common in these kinds of settings.

the manga is still ongoing and the plot is getting really meaty and juicy right now, so i look forward to the future of this manga and to seeing her expand more on the themes of inequity and access to magic (i.e. access to power, education, social standing, money) in her world that she's been laying the groundwork for.

i also love love love the way the magic system in the world works. knowing from her author’s note that her inspiration for this story came from this idea of seeing the ability to draw and create art as magical puts it in perspective. there’s so many parallels drawn with the witches as artists, and magic as an act of artistic creation and expression. so much of this story is about love and joy for art, finding the bravery and self belief to create art  authentic to yourself, dealing with insecurities and comparison to others as an artist, having to balance public reception and demand, finding community with other artists. above all when you read witch hat atelier, you can feel the author’s sense of joy, hope and love for art and for the world we live in.